Hijacking of Panix.com is still a mystery

Hijacking of Panix.com is still a mystery

On Friday, in an unusual incident an ISP from New York found that their domain had been hijacked without their consent. It threw all the major operations of the company in turmoil considering the mail services went down. The company worked around the clock over the weekend to recover the lost control of the domain and understand what actually happened.

The company said on a temporary hosted page: “Panix’s main domain name, panix.com, was temporarily hijacked over the weekend by parties unknown. The false information for the panix.com domain was present at the top-level Internet domain servers from 04:30 Saturday morning Jan 15 until 6 PM Sunday Jan 16 (US-EST), when the domain was returned to us. As a result of this attack, mail, Web access, and other connectivity to the panix.com domain was disrupted.

Due to the distributed nature of the Internet domain name system, we estimate that the false information will persist in some places until 6:15 PM Monday US-EST. Until then, if you have trouble reaching a panix.com site or sending mail to a panix.com customer, please try using the domain panix.net instead.”

The company has by now recovered access to their domain from the new hosts in Australia Melbourne IT. Company expects to be back online to full force within 24 hours considering the time difference around the world.

The reasons of this unusual incident is still a mystery considering the original hosts of the domain Dotster confirmed that according to their system, the domain had not been transferred. The domain however was pointing towards Melbourne IT when the glitch was discovered. Experts are blaming it on some conflict with the Internet registry system at the highest levels.

We are sure to hear more on this…